The plan is to create the manual and tutorials later in a collaborative way.
This work is postponed until the software is actually usable.
Lumiera is a Free/Open Source project to build a Non-Linear Video Editing (NLE) and compositing application for GNU/Linux. Its primary focus is professional editing, quality, usability and flexibility. On the one hand, it must meet the rigours of a professional film and video production environment; on the other hand, it must be flexible enough to satisfy the needs of more modest single-user equipment.
These ambitious goals have led us to a complex and flexible internal structure, over the course of the last years. Many elements still need to be connected and integrated, so that the functionality becomes visible and can be explored by users. And we are a small team. Nevertheless, please be assured that work on the project is ongoing.
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Look at the Git repositories to see current activity
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Visit the »Lumiera from Outer Space« page at the Lumiera.org website to read more about the Design and Vision.
UI Experiments
While most of the work is focused at the inner workings of the Render Engine (as of Nov.2025), the User Interface has been upgraded to GTK-3 and outfitted with some experimental connection channels, to test interplay with the application core.
After launching the lumiera application, a main window will be displayed.
Video Output
The ▶play / ⏸pause / ⏹stop buttons will activate some video output demo code, which is actually quite old — it was extracted 2009 from the Kino video editing software and used for various experiments since then. In its current shape, this dummy playback ensures that Lumiera is properly built and linked to use the XVideo standard with the help of the X11 XServer. This archaic standard from 1991 presumably was the first widely available and vendor-neutral interface for passing raw video frames to the GPU, which then scales and integrates them into the desktop display.
The video frames for this demo are not generated by the Lumiera Render Engine — and thus this code is largely obsolete; maybe it will continue to live somewhere as a fallback for systems without proper support of OpenGL?
The UI-Bus
Instead of accessing a shared data model, the Lumiera UI is connected to the core through an asynchronous messaging channel, to dispatch command instructions into the session and to push responses up into the UI. There is a demo to verify this setup by pushing info and error messages into the »Info Box«
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In the “Help” menu, there is the entry ‘Help > Self Tests’
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The tab #1099 in this non-modal dialog box allows to push notification messages into the UI-Bus…
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enter some text into the input widget at the top
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send a display message with this text at Info / Warn / or Error level
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or push the “mark” button to send a
markmessage, selected from the drop-down
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Timeline Display
The second tab in this “Test and Diagnostics” dialog box (‘Help > Self Tests’) allows to Populate the Timeline Display with a structure corresponding to session content. This structure is sent over the UI-Bus as a “Diff Message” — basically the core can notify the UI about changes in structured content elements, which both sides know, without ever sharing a common data representation.
This demo engages this mechanism to populate an previously empty Timeline with structured content; the actual content is hard-wired for this test, offering two flavours (“Sequence 1” and “Sequence 2”).
- Sequence 1
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A single Track, with two Clips, which can be clicked and dragged; they have a fixed given length, but no further content.
- Sequence 2
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A complex arrangement of nested tracks, some of which are expanded, and some have overview rulers. Note that it is possible to scroll vertically, while the top-level overview rulers remain always visible and pinned on top. Note furthermore that the Track-Head display in the left pane scrolles alongside, and remains in sync with the main content pane. Tracks can not yet be expanded / collapsed
The Button “move elements” is part of an ongoing experiment and currently disabled.
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the panes can be undocked and re-arranged, but retain their identity, so that they can be addressed via UI-Bus without knowing where they are actually located in the UI. And there are various known problems related to those docks… |